ESCONDIDO  It looks like the manure dumped on a dead North County golf course has officially hit the fan.

The owner of the defunct Escondido Country Club was cited by the county Monday and faces fines of $10,000 a day for dumping chicken excrement on a number of abandoned fairways, a county official said.

The citations were sent to Stuck in the Rough LLC and its owner, Michael Schlesinger, as well as to the owner of an egg ranch that supplied the manure, said Bob Kard, the director of the county’s Air Pollution Control District.

Kard said inspectors were in the country club area all weekend and noted the continuing stench of the manure, which was deposited on several of the property’s fairways over the past two weeks.

An attorney for Stuck in the Rough said Monday the company did nothing wrong when it put “a legal product that is used nationally” on a small section of the course. Once complaints surfaced, the company acted quickly to address the problem, said the attorney, Ronald Richards, in an email to U-T San Diego.

He said Stuck in the Rough hired an eight-man cleaning service to remove the product and abate the problem.

Kard said the manure odor still registered a Level 3 or 4 Monday on the district’s smell scale, down from a Level 5 — the worst rating — recorded by a county inspector at the site last week.

Neighbors have said the intensity of the odor varies, depending on several factors including wind conditions and proximity to the course.

Jerry Swadley, the president of the Escondido Country Club Homeowners Organization, said he and his wife took a walk Monday morning and noticed that at “certain areas along the way, the odor was still extremely noxious, obnoxious and onerous. But it is dying down a little bit.”

The Escondido Country Club closed in 2013. It looks much different today.
— Charlie Neuman

The Escondido Country Club closed in 2013. It looks much different today.
— Charlie Neuman

Homeowners who live on or near the golf course have been at odds with Schlesinger since he bought the country club in late 2012 and shut it down a short time later. He wants to build hundreds of homes on the property.

Residents launched a ballot initiative to have the site declared permanent open space and the city signed the measure into law last year rather than putting it to a public vote.

Schlesinger sued the city, claiming the law amounts to an illegal “taking” of his property. That suit is still pending. In addition, he recently launched his own ballot initiative that would undo the open-space designation.

Though the golf course hasn’t been watered for more than a year, manure was dumped on the site March 25, April 4 and April 8, nearby homeowners said.

Bob Fawley, a resident who gathered the information, said the manure was deposited on 10 fairways that are closest to the majority of homes that border the golf course. The fairways where few or no homes are located were not subjected to the chicken poop.

Kard said the pollution district fines could be increased if it’s determined that the manure was put on the course for the sole purpose of creating a stench.

“To do something in a negligent fashion, it could be $100,000 per day; if you do something in a willful and intentional fashion it can be $125,000 per day, or if it’s a (large) corporation, $500,000 per day,” Kard said. “Obviously for a nuisance like this we’re not going to see penalties like that, but $10,000 a day is not unreasonable … and then we negotiate to come up with some amicable number that we think provides deterrence, which is what the penalties are all about.”

Richards, the attorney for Stuck in the Rough, said he has been in contact with the pollution district’s lawyer and believes that ultimately the company won’t be fined at all.

“I believe when they see our legal response to the citations, we won’t be penalized or the matter will be resolved per the Board’s policies,” Richards said in an email.

He said complaints about the smell were not ignored.

“We responded and spent thousands of dollars to fix the problem before any citation or notice to comply was issued,” Richards said. “A public nuisance requires much more than a property owner hearing about a complaint then immediately responding to it and removing the issue with alacrity.”

Kard said Richards is mistaken.

“When somebody causes a public nuisance we don’t have to give them prior notice if there is a problem,” Card said. The citations will document a public nuisance beginning on April 8 and continuing at least through this weekend, he said.

Kard said citations will also be issued to the owners of the Armstrong Egg Farms in Valley Center who supplied the manure.

The egg ranch’s owner, Ryan Armstrong, said Monday he has heard nothing from the district. He said his business sells dry manure to all sorts of clients, but not raw manure.

“All of our stuff is dried and composted,” he said. He also said he does not tell any of his customers what to do with the manure. “They ask for it and we sell it to them.”